Expand description
Rudb’s single-file columnar snapshot format.
A committed directory names independently readable column pages. It has two levels: a catalog directory naming every table in the file, which is what a footer slot points at and what opening a database reads, and one directory per table under it holding that table’s stripes, pages and statistics. One slot write publishes all of them, so a commit is atomic across tables.
This version handles scalar columns; the file header has two generation slots so an unfinished
replacement directory cannot hide the last complete one. See
spec/storage-v3/12-many-tables-in-one-file.md.
§Parts and stripes
A part is one appended chunk, which is a thousand rows, and it is the unit a scan decodes and hands to the pipeline. A stripe is sixty four parts, and it is the unit the directory describes and the unit the file is laid out in: one page per column per stripe, holding that column’s sixty four part payloads end to end.
The two are separate because they are sized by different pressures. A part wants to be small because it is a vector and vectors live in cache. A stripe wants to be large because everything the directory holds is per stripe and the directory is one buffer that has to be read and decoded before a single row can be answered. A hundred million rows of the hundred and five column ClickBench table is ninety seven thousand parts, and a directory with a page entry and a pair of bounds per part per column is several hundred megabytes, which is what made that load fail before this split existed. Sixty four parts to a stripe divides that by sixty four.
Where the parts of a page start is not in the directory either, for the same reason. Each stripe writes one index page holding a length and a checksum per part per column, and a reader preads the sixty four entries belonging to the column it wants. A scan reads the whole column page once and slices it; a sparse row fetch reads the index entries and then only the part it needs.
Structs§
- Catalog
- Every table a native file holds, without the directory of any of them.
- Column
Layout - Where one column’s bytes went, taken from the directory rather than by reading pages.
- Common
- What a native table’s frequency synopsis says about one value, as the planner asks for it.
- Frequency
Occurrences - Sparse row ordinals covered by a numeric frequency candidate set.
- Frequency
Prefix - The values one column’s frequency synopsis lists, with a bound on everything it left out.
- Layout
- Where a whole file’s bytes went.
- Opening
- What
Reader::openread before it returned. - Reader
- Reads committed native column pages without holding the table in memory.
- Reads
- What a reader has read, while it was being opened and since.
- Stripe
- One independently readable stripe of a table.
- Stripes
- The bounds of a committed native table, as the planner asks for them.
- Table
- The committed table directory.
- Writer
- Appends pages and commits a new directory.
Constants§
- STRIPE_
PARTS - Parts in one stripe.
Functions§
- distincts
- How many distinct values each column of a native table holds, for the columns it can say.